Page 113 of Heart of Mischief

“Well,” he said, dusting off his pants. “Not as fire-and-lava-and-headless-horsemen as I was expecting, but it’ll do.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Charlie pushed herself to her feet. Henry nimbly scaled her body, coming to rest on her shoulder. “We only just got here. I’m sure the headless horsemen will turn up soon enough.”

“Into the pathway, then?”

“It seems to be our only choice.” Charlie walked over and peered into the space. “Let’s hope it isn’t some kind of maze.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Charlie had been afraid that her magic wouldn’t work in Helheim. That the physics of this realm were so different from Asgard it would be impossible to find the currents. Thankfully, when she turned inward, they were still there, steady as ever. She used the same technique that she had in the passageway to lift Elias’s body and float it beside her. Once she nodded to Mason that she was ready, her brother led the way into the forest of cacti.

Charlie followed close behind, Henry still on her shoulder. Hard sand and rocks crunched under her shoes. The dense cacti were too high to afford her any kind of visibility over them, and they cast long shadows over their path—though Charlie couldn’t spot any sun. It was as if light merely existed in Helheim, a floating entity, not cast by any star. She wondered if the realm always looked like this. If there were nights and days or different seasons. She had a sneaking suspicion that there weren’t.

After five or ten minutes of following the winding path—orperhaps an hour, Charlie had no idea whether time passed the same on Helheim as it did on Asgard—Mason muttered something unintelligible.

“What?” Charlie asked.

“Nothing, I—” He cut off, seeming to weigh his words. “I feel like I’ve been here before.”

Charlie’s eyebrows rose. “To Helheim? Or in a cacti forest like this one?”

“Both,” Mason said. “Neither. I… I don’t know. I’m just having this bizarre sense of déjà vu.”

His words tickled at something in Charlie’s memory. Something that had been glossed over in the chaos of homecoming, dropping into the back of her conscious as far less important than the other revelations that came out of that night. But now, walking through Helheim and hearing Mason say he was experiencing déjà vu…

“Is it the same thing you felt on homecoming?” she asked. “When you first saw Asgard, I mean. You said… you said you thought you’d seen it before.”

Charlie couldn’t see Mason’s face, but she could picture his expression: the way he chewed his bottom lip while worried, eyebrows drawing together.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, it’s almost exactly like that.”

A chill snaked down Charlie’s spine. Once is a coincidence; twice is a pattern. That was something her history teacher had once said. He’d used it in referring to a completely different concept—how historical events tend to repeat themselves—but she couldn’t help but feel that the words applied to their situation.

Once is a coincidence; twice is a pattern.

Had Mason been to Helheim before? Had she and Sophie?

Mason was older than the twins. Only by a year; it was enough.

Enough that he might remember things she couldn’t.

There was something else, too. A tickling at the back of her brain. It wasn’t déjà vu; Charlie couldn’t remember ever visiting aplace like this before. It was so foreign, so alien, like something out of a dystopian film. Still,somethingwas nudging at her mind, trying to get her attention. She just couldn’t figure out what.

They rounded another bend in the path. The cacti surrounding them were as thick and looming as they had been at the beginning. There was no sun in the sky to help orient them, no other markers to tell them how far they’d traveled. Charlie was starting to fear that they were walking in circles and would soon find themselves in the same clearing where they’d begun.

Thankfully, they soon turned a corner and found themselves staring at the exit.

Mason exhaled loudly. “Thank Odin. I thought we were going to die in there.”

They took off for the exit at a jog, Elias’s body floating beside them. Charlie thought briefly ofThe Mandalorian, which she’d binge-watched in one weekend with Lou and Abigail. Abigail spent the whole weekend pointing out the scientific inaccuracies in the show, but Lou could do nothing but fawn over how cute Grogu (Baby Yoda) was as he drifted beside the Mandalorian in a high-tech, floating baby cradle. Charlie had a bizarre vision of herself as a space bounty hunter, Elias the adorable alien baby floating beside her. She let out an involuntary, high-pitched giggle that sounded more like hysteria than humor.

Mason glanced at her. “You good?”

“Fine, fine,” said Charlie as they approached the exit.I mean, we’ve teleported to a different realm and Elias is slowly dying beside me and I shouldn’t even care if he does but the thought of a world without him makes me feel like I’m both going to throw up and lose my mind but it’s fine, I’m totally f—

Her thoughts came to an abrupt halt when she and Mason crashed at full speed into the empty air at the end of the cactus maze. Henry squawked as the impact sent him soaring off Charlie’s shoulder.

“What the—” Mason stumbled backward, clawing at his nose. “Damn.Odin’s tighty-whitiesthat hurt—”